Plastic card is very common in our daily lives, from credit cards to driver’s license, from membership cards to employee ID card, they are everywhere. They have standard size, portability and durability that make them ideal for many applications. Digital plastic card printers provide the ability to create custom cards as needed. With computer and image capture systems, such as digital cameras, plastic card printers provide a highly integrated system transfer point. Each card takes only a few seconds to print, the printing process will be very fast, so the card can be generated immediately and personalized, and quickly connect the customer or cardholder to the issuer or program.
Any type of plastic cards, be it ID cards or plastic discount cards, can be printed easily and quickly.
Digitally printed plastic cards provide many technical functions, but starting from the blank card, you can print any combination of art, graphics, text, digital photos, barcodes, symbols, etc. Additional machine readable information, such as magnetic strips and smart card chips, can also be encoded.
Process of Plastic Card Printing
All plastic card printers have the same basic printing operation; dye sublimation and/or thermal transfer printing. Both techniques involve the heating of the thermal print head. However, thermal transfer printing is different from dye sublimation because heat transfer uses ink instead of dye. In thermal transfer, the ink on the hot meter is transferred to the surface of the card.
In the sublimation of the dye, the evaporated dye is heated and then penetrated into the plastic card. A ribbon for color dye sublimation printed and is divided into three separate colored panels yellow, magenta and cyan. This configuration is called YMC.
These three colors are the primary colors including blacks during printing. The dye obtained from the ribbon is applied to the plastic card through multi-channel operation. This means that the card will pass through the print head of three color ribbon panels and apply each color separately.
“Dye sublimation” is also called dye diffusion. When the dye on the print head is heated, the dye transforms from the solid into a gas and diffuses to the plastic card, and the plastic card is specifically coated to absorb the color dye. The temperature of the print head controls the quantity of the dye transformation into a gas.
As the print head temperature increases, more dyes can be absorbed into the plastic card. The advantage of sublimation of dyes is that millions of colors can be created. Changing the heat strength on the ribbon board produces different hue of each color, making the color choice almost unlimited. As mentioned above, the thermal transfer and dye sublimation have different inks instead of dyes.
This is, in brief, the process of plastic card printing. As mentioned, the process is very fast and be it a business ID or plastic discount cards, it’s just a matter of seconds to get a brightly designed card at your disposal.
